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arXiv 2025

Plan-X

Instruct Video Generation via Semantic Planning

1Duke University 2Princeton University 3ByteDance Intelligent Creation 4Apple
*Work done during an internship at ByteDance.
TL;DR

Plan-X joins LLM-style in-context reasoning with diffusion video generation. A multimodal Semantic Planner first sketches what should happen as spatio-temporal semantic tokens, and a video DiT then renders it in high fidelity.

Results

Plan-XThe dog lowers its head towards the mushroom, gently grips the mushroom stem with its mouth, carefully pulls the mushroom from the log, then swallows it.
Plan-XThe boy extends his left hand towards the green cube, picks it up from the mat, and carefully places the green cube on top of the red fire truck.
Plan-XThe woman picks up the silver watering can, tips the can, pouring water into the geranium pot, then places the watering can back on the table.
Plan-XWoman slowly raises her head, looks up towards the bronze owl statue, reaches her right hand to the shelf, picks up the owl statue, and places it carefully on the open book.

Abstract

Diffusion Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual synthesis, yet they often struggle with high-level semantic reasoning and long-horizon planning. This limitation frequently leads to visual hallucinations and mis-alignments with user instructions, especially in scenarios involving complex scene understanding, human-object interactions, multi-stage actions, and in-context motion reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose Plan-X, a framework that explicitly enforces high-level semantic planning to instruct video generation process. At its core lies a Semantic Planner, a learnable multimodal language model that reasons over the user's intent from both text prompts and visual context, and autoregressively generates a sequence of text-grounded spatio-temporal semantic tokens. These semantic tokens, complementary to high-level text prompt guidance, serve as structured “semantic sketches” over time for the video diffusion model, which has its strength at synthesizing high-fidelity visual details. Plan-X effectively integrates the strength of language models in multimodal in-context reasoning and planning, together with the strength of diffusion models in photorealistic video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework substantially reduces visual hallucinations and enables fine-grained, instruction-aligned video generation consistent with multimodal context.

Method

Plan-X method overview

Overview. The Semantic Planner (an MLLM) takes the scene prompt, the motion description, a system prompt that sets the number of target frames, and optionally the encoded first frame. It autoregressively emits text-aligned semantic tokens that encode keyframe-level spatio-temporal structure. A dedicated semantic guidance branch with 3D spatio-temporal RoPE feeds these tokens to a pretrained DiT, which renders a temporally coherent video.

Base DiT vs. Plan-X

Seedance 1.0 (base)
Plan-X-Seedance (ours)
Fixed camera. The woman slowly stands up from the ground, using both hands on the floor to push herself up. She glances around, then raises her arms and stretches upward.
Seedance 1.0 (base)
Plan-X-Seedance (ours)
Fixed camera. A hand reaches out to the passport on the table and places it on the record.
Plan-X comparisons with Seedance 1.0 and Wan 2.2

Keyframes from the paper: Plan-X stays faithful to multi-step, interaction-heavy prompts where the base models drift or hallucinate.

More comparisons, ablations, and applications are on the project page →

BibTeX

@article{huang2025planx,
  title   = {Plan-X: Instruct Video Generation via Semantic Planning},
  author  = {Huang, Lun and Xie, You and Xu, Hongyi and Gu, Tianpei and Zhang, Chenxu and Song, Guoxian and Li, Zenan and Zhao, Xiaochen and Luo, Linjie and Sapiro, Guillermo},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17986},
  year    = {2025}
}